Up Late

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And being “gay in spite of it” is what affirms Yeats’s “gaiety transfiguring all that dread,” his “Lapis Lazuli” Chinamen whose “ancient, glittering eyes are gay.” Anne Tannam has published three poetry collections. The most recent one, Twenty-six Letters of an Alphabet, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. Up Late was written by Laird as an elegy to his father, who died of Covid in March 2021. The judges felt Up Late “sincerely engaged with death, grief and the private and shared lived experience of the pandemic in ways which readers will find profoundly moving and cathartic”. A book I read for the first time this year was Edith Wharton’s Custom of the Country. I’m a Wharton fan— The Age of Innocence is probably my favourite novel—but even I was surprised by how much I loved this. Has there ever been a better depiction of a social climber? Undine Spragg is gorgeous, ladylike, ambitious and in need of a filthy rich husband (or several). People mistake her beauty for vulnerability, and she uses their naivete against them. Everyone’s too busy admiring her style and good looks to notice they should be extremely frightened of her. She’s deeply impatient—with bad taste, ugliness, dullness, boredom. Nothing brings her more pleasure than a good party, a fashionable dress, a favourable glance. She’s an assassin; she might be the most vicious character ever written. What I mean to say: she is an icon, the moment. There’s something sadly modern about her too. When she’s asked what she wants she simply replies, ‘I want what the others want.’ Poor Undine, even her desires aren’t her own. Wharton is interesting because she’s never instructive; no good deed goes unpunished in her work. The Age of Anxiety is virtuosic in places, full of verbal energy and rhythm and documentary details (“Near-sighted scholars on canal paths/Defined their terms”) but is overextended, and all four characters sound both a lot like Auden and, thanks to the insistent Anglo-Saxon alliteration, like no one who’s ever lived. (“Muster no monsters, I’ll meeken my own…./You may wish till you waste, I’ll want here…./Too blank the blink of these blind heavens.”) The unnaturalness of the language begins to grate.

Laird is currently working on a third novel, alongside husbanding his ongoing cache of poems, editing an anthology of poetry with Don Paterson – "no real theme beyond poems that we like" – as well as working on a TV project with Smith ("something historical and not an adaptation"). They previously collaborated on a projected Kafka musical with a musician friend that went unfinished, and Laird says that while they regularly engage with each other's writing, "it has been nice to work together on a new project". People don’t understand that it’s possible to believe in a thing and ridicule it at the same time…. It’s hard for them, too, to see that a person’s statement of belief is no proof of belief, any more than a love poem is proof that one is in love. Auden witnessed the worst of nationalism and felt it his moral obligation to be alienated from the crowd, the mob. Did he succeed in uncoupling nationalism from poetry? Eliot, in “The Social Function of Poetry,” wrote that “no art is more stubbornly national than poetry,” and Yeats’s entire project was to create a nation, a unifying myth for Ireland—from the Celtic twilight poems and Cathleen ni Houlihan to one of his final poems, “Cuchulain Comforted.” He wanted “an Ireland/The poets have imagined.”The Murderess” contrasts lust (“I tell you men/were leering to themselves”) with the historical violence done to the female (“the sun/opens to consume the Virgin on the fifteenth day”). Any deities present are also complicit. After the virgin has been sacrificed (“It was like slitting fish”), the reader learns that “God presided at her body.” Being an inveterate schematizer, 3 Auden cannot resist a further categorization when it comes to Berlin, who takes his two classes of thinkers from Archilochus. Auden, in response, goes to Lewis Carroll: all men, he insists, may be divided into Alices and Mabels. (Mabel is one of Alice’s friends, who “knows such a very little.”) Auden’s elaboration is slightly nonsensical—he decides that a Mabel is an “intellectual with weak nerves and a timid heart, who is so appalled at discovering that life is not sweetly and softly pretty that he takes a grotesquely tough, grotesquely ‘realist’ attitude,” and he puts Donne, Schopenhauer, Joyce, and Wagner in the Mabel column—but it’s typical of Auden to steer the argument to childhood. Danny Denton‘s most recent novel is All Along The Echo. He lectures on writing at University College Cork, and is a contributing editor for The Stinging Fly. Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2023. Nicole took over as host of our podcast in September 2022.

While at school Laird won national poetry competitions but was set to study law at Cambridge before changing to English. "As is fairly usual for any small town, if you were regarded as having half a brain it was assumed you should become a doctor or a lawyer. So while changing was obviously the right decision for me, it was a big thing to give up a vocational course for something more abstract." Watching my granduncle’s funeral online. Six familiar family heads popping up and down on the bottom of my screen like iTunes updates responding to the demands of the Mass. I let my cup of tea go cold. It would be disrespectful, I figured, to drink tea. I knew my grandaunt was watching from her house. If she drank tea, or something stronger, it wouldn’t have been disrespectful but I couldn’t take her cue. Couldn’t recreate ritual alone. The man who, during the thirties, was one of the five or six best poets in the world has gradually turned into a rhetoric mill grinding away at the bottom of Limbo, into an automaton that keeps making little jokes, little plays on words, little rhetorical engines, as compulsively and unendingly and uneasily as a neurotic washes his hands. His attraction to the country was partly about escape from the old certainties: he told Robert Fitzgerald that “America is the place because nationalities don’t mean anything here, there are only human beings, and that’s how the future must be.” Auden found new subjects and concerns in the United States—early on he befriended the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who was influential in his return to Christianity, which is, according to Auden, “a way, not a state, and a Christian is never something one is, only something one can pray to become.” Kallman’s Jewishness provided him, however, with access to a different set of references, and Kallman also got him interested in grand opera. They collaborated on libretti, including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951).This year’s favourite is ‘The Writing Life’, a version of which you can read here. This beautiful essay is about a class Chee took with Annie Dillard in 1989, and paints a picture of Dillard, of their relationship (warm, respectful, funny) and of Dillard’s approach to writing pedagogy. It’s a masterclass in writing and, quite literally, a masterclass in writing, and has taught me more about writing in my regular re-readings than I care to admit. Sasha de Buyl writes short stories and creative non-fiction. Their work has been published in Gutter, Bloomers and Belfield Literary Review among others. In 2022, they were awarded an Arts Council Agility Award for Literature. Lucy Macnab, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, said: “We view this partnership as a significant step toward our future strategic vision: to move away from the dominance of London in the UK’s creative and cultural life; a drive toward working more inclusively with young people, emerging voices, and diverse audiences, putting them at the centre of our practice; and working with partners that put poetry at the heart of their creative offer.” The full shortlists The Forward Arts Foundation, which runs the awards, also announced that next year’s judging panels will be chaired by Bernardine Evaristo and Joelle Taylor. Evaristo will chair the panel judging the collection length entries, while Taylor will chair the panel focusing on best single poem and a new category for best single poem – performed. Why do so few ask why those most affected by the train are forced or reduced to writing about the train? Who pushed us onto the train and what would happen if we refused to bring everything we create on board?

Two men, two artists, both named Asle, weave their way through the streets of Bjorgevin in Jon Fosse’s Septology, through chapters comprising a single, sinuous, supple yet graceful sentence filled with echoes and subtly shifting repetitions, at once limpid as water and nebulous as mist seen through a veil. Are they indeed two, on simply avatars of a singular life lived differently, of paths taken and not taken, passions kindled and spent, talents used and wasted? We cannot know—but most importantly: in the resplendent, all-encompassing whole, such prosaic details do not matter. By Him is dispelled the darkness wherein the fallen will cannot distinguish between temptation and sin, for in Him we become fully conscious of Necessity as our freedom to be tempted, and of Freedom as our Necessity to have faith… The second line’s unusual syntax replicates the cumbersome nature of the body, so the subject of the sentence, the soul, the “it,” finds itself in the middle of the clause swamped on either side by excess, the mild alliteration of “the body became for” on one side and on the other the assonance of “too large a garment.” There is a sense of menace in that buried phrase “came for it” as one might come for a condemned man. I find this classification entertaining and illuminating, but I think it needs elaboration. Are there not artists, for example, who, precisely because they can perceive no unifying hedgehog principle governing the flux of experience, are aesthetically all the more hedgehog, imposing in their art the unity they cannot find in life?

Nick Laird

In his first year in New York, Auden, then thirty-two, met the eighteen-year-old Chester Kallman, who was, as The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden rather brutally puts it, “an aggressively ‘out’ and promiscuous homosexual who, though Jewish, had the stereotypical ‘Aryan’ good looks Auden favoured.” Through turmoil and betrayals and temporary separations, Kallman and Auden were to remain partners for the rest of Auden’s life.

The schoolboy humor attempts to subvert and deflate the adult dignity and certainty and self-congratulation (“I have discovered the origin of life”); the unresolved tension between these two aspects of Auden’s character was to play out in his work for the rest of his life. Her greatness—and she is one of the finest poets writing today—is due, in no small part, to her intransigence. Many of her poems are great in the same way. The child’s anger and resentment at his parents in, say, Firstborn and Ararat becomes Telemachus’ anger and resentment against Penelope and Odysseus in Meadowlands. The poems are franked with the distinct impress of a personality.

Adult readers may enjoy seeing a different side to some of our finest writers, but for children, this is irrelevant; they just want great stories, brilliantly told. With these three new books, that’s exactly what they’ve got. He is always described, and self-described, as homosexual, though for several years in the 1940s he had a sexual relationship with a woman, Rhoda Jaffe, and brief affairs with women at other times in his life. ↩ He thought that “to grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence but to make use of them in an adult way. But for the child in us, we should be incapable of intellectual curiosity.” The “intricate play of the mind” allowed Auden to entertain, as it were, notions, and he was intellectually promiscuous, always open to new modes, new thoughts. Eliot’s well-known observation of Henry James, that he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it, might be reversed in Auden’s situation. He was interested in everything—in psychology, Christianity, opera, Thucydides, Diaghilev, Tolstoy, Shakespeare; or, to take some examples from his poem “Spain 1937,”“the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing,”“the diffusion/Of the counting-frame and the cromlech,”“the photographing of ravens,”“the divination of water,”“the origin of Mankind,”“the absolute value of Greek,”“the installation of dynamos and turbines,”“theological feuds in the taverns”…